and subtitled “Austria, a Studio Film.” Some television films based on stories by Arthur Schnitzler had given him the idea. The characters in these films had appeared only in bare interiors; the closest thing to the outside world was the inside of a hansom cab. Keuschnig started his article by saying that the image of Austria put forward by these films was expressed in their sets. By this, he didn’t mean that typically Austrian objects figured in the sets; no, he meant that their very bareness seemed to express a view of Austria, that the characters moved in a setting that could have been anywhere. Austria was represented as a historyless no man’s land peopled by historyless Everymans, and to judge by these films, just that was specifically Austrian. When a character entered in a state of excitement, his exciting experience hadn’t occurred in any particular country but in the vestibule. Keuschnig now set out to prove that because the country never played a part and because the action was never inflected by so much as a passing glance at the landscape the characters seemed to RECITE their experiences (possibly after memorizing them in the vestibule)—MEMO-RIZ E D embraces, the MEMORIZED expressions of two lovers looking into each other’s eyes; MEMORIZED kisses—and that the films themselves … (now what exactly did he want to say?), that because the characters in these films ..
